Is a ginkgo a good tree to plant in Indiana?
Ginkgo can work here, with caveats. Not native — every ginkgo here was planted deliberately, as a street tree, campus tree or specimen. Purdue's West Lafayette campus is locally notorious for its female ginkgos and the October smell, and older Indianapolis neighborhoods have plenty of municipal plantings.
What you'd be signing up to clean up
A male ginkgo drops almost nothing but one spectacular leaf fall — it abscises its entire canopy within a day or two of the first hard freeze, usually mid-to-late November here, so it is one rake instead of six weeks of them. Female trees are the actual problem: fleshy seed coats land in October, smell like rancid butter or vomit because of butyric acid, and get tracked indoors on shoes.
Where to keep it away from
Deep, coarse and unusually well behaved for a tree this size — ginkgo is one of the few large shade trees you can put in a five-foot tree lawn without budgeting for a lifted sidewalk, and it transplants easily because of it. The flip side is that a newly planted ginkgo looks like it is doing nothing for two or three years while it builds roots, and homeowners often kill them with over-watering or trimmer damage during that window.
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